The Pasty Anthology

Greggs bakeries have forced themselves onto the high street with all the tenacity of a plague of wasps at a picnic. The Pasty Anthology explores this phenomenon through a selection of comic strips and short fiction focusing on the brand and its death grip on lunchtime. One story, painting a respectable history of the bakery through the ages, explains how Greggs was named by Henry VIII in honour of his pet goose, and goes on to describe how, with typical Victorian benevolence, the patrons rallied round to found the St Greggs Hospice — “for the children of those killed or maimed in hot filling accidents”. The comic pays a wry tribute to the chain’s recognisably mundane presence, which is best summarised by the cover image: a branch which has sprung up between some rocks on an otherwise deserted beach. Even Robinson Crusoe would pile on the pounds.